'FRIVOLOUS FLUFF' IS SERIOUS STUFF TO ENGLAND'S MASTER OF FARCE

As England's master of popular farces, Cooney has created 13 plays about naughty people who cause chaos as they dodge, scramble and lie outrageously to avoid getting caught.

In his Run for Your Wife, which tickled South Florida audiences two years ago, a deceptively bland-looking cab driver races between his two houses to satisfy two wives, neither of whom knows about the other. With Two into One, which opens tonight at Parker Playhouse, Cooney applies his comic formula to an all-too-timely story of sexual shenanigans among politicians.

The title refers to the saying "Two into one won't go," meaning you can't do the impossible. But Cooney's characters try: A British government minister wants to have an illicit rendezvous with a secretary, so he has his aide book a hotel room, except the minister's wife gets the idea that the aide wants to have an affair with her and has booked that same room for the two of them. The minister and aide get their signals mixed, everyone is running around with aliases, "and it gets more complicated after that," Cooney said with a droll smile.

A slight man with a tonsure of red hair that belies his gentle manner, Cooney was sitting in the club next door to the Royal Poinciana Playhouse, where Two into One was only a week from opening. Though he had just visited the beach with his wife of 25 years, Cooney has little time for larking about: As happens with most of his plays, Cooney is not only Two's writer but its director and star as well. He plays the hapless aide, sharing the stage with Millicent Martin and Paxton Whitehead.

It's just coincidence that Two into One has arrived in America on the heels of the Gary Hart scandal, Cooney explained. "I wrote it about five years ago. But you're very safe in England in writing about politicians' peccadilloes. It's astonishing, the risks they take, to jeopardize their careers."

If Cooney's plays seem topical, it's because he writes about universal problems and feelings. "There's no doubt that my plays are very much situation comedies, and people the world over can relate to the situations," he said mildly. "There's no doubt that the one special thing about human beings is their ability to laugh. The fact that an audience can see what under different circumstances would be a tragedy, and laugh at it, is a special way of coping with it."

Cooney knows his plays are not high art. In fact, he insists on it. Forty years ago, at the age of 14, Cooney abandoned higher education for a career in the theater, acting with different groups before joining a comedy troupe that became his professional home for 10 years. Because he shares the popular taste, the writer said, he knows how to entertain the public.

"I was quite bright, but I hadn't been overeducated and I'm very working middle class," Cooney said matter-of-factly. "I think I very much have the common touch. I don't intellectualize about what I write."

His characters don't intellectualize about their predicaments, either. "There isn't time. They have to deal with it."

Instead of giving thought, Cooney's characters take action. As their troubles get deeper and deeper, they move faster and faster, trying to avert each new crisis with ever-wilder deceptions. Bewilderingly complex business and breakneck pacing can make good farce as complicated to orchestrate as a fire-fight on three fronts.

"You have to be an actor to understand how these plays work," the playwright explained. From having performed comedy so long, he said, "I understand the stagecraft of it. And the one thing I was always good at in school was algebra, and there's something algebraic to my plays."

After presenting Cooney's first comedies, One for the Pot and Chase Me, Comrade, the troupe he belonged to disbanded and the playwright/actor/director added another job to his list -- producer. But his different and sometimes conflicting duties don't faze him.

"If you enjoy what you're doing the way I do, it's just as easy," he noted cheerfully. In fact, working on a play from several different directions gives him insight and perspective that he might otherwise miss, he said. For instance, as an actor, Cooney sometimes finds flaws in his own writing which, as a playwright, "you wouldn't necessarily see when you're up there in your attic."

When he creates a new play, he usually works for several months on the plot, then for several more on writing the dialogue. A workshop production at a theater in Surrey, England, comes next, followed by rewrites, another tryout and more rewrites before the script is produced in London. With Run for Your Wife, Cooney ended up scrapping the script's last 18 pages. Two into One took him two years to perfect.

Cooney may hold no illusions about the significance of his plays, but he still is proud of the work he does so well. It has certain rewards.

"You see a thousand strangers throwing their heads back with laughter and, oh yes, it's quite a worthwhile job to be doing," said Cooney, smiling. Farce, he concluded, with a paradox worthy of Oscar Wilde, "is still only a piece of frivolous fluff -- that's why it seems so important to me to get it right."